2004 (28)

Search Engine Optimization got a lot easier

Dear readers, if you haven’t checked out the SEO Toolkit yet, you owe it to yourself to go there now, download it and start using it. Point it to your sites and it will explore them and give you a full report of all the little problems that are getting in the way of search engines.

I was excited to try out the SEO Toolkit but after installing the Web Platform Installer, it says that it doesn't support my OS. This makes no sense because I'm running Windows XP SP3 and it's on the list of supported OS's. Lame...

That's in fact interesting tool and it does produce sometimes shocking results. It can be very useful in detecting issues a developer will not be able to detect otherwise (like some broken link buried in the depth of your pages). It definitely should be in the arsenal of any web developer.

Couple of things though to mention.

1. It will not work with IIS 6 - I tried.
2. It will not make your website significantly better SEOed, it will merely point to the errors you have to fix. But it will not tell you what you need to do make it significantly more spider-friendly.

But it is a good tool nevertheless. Whoever was developing it at Microsoft - thank you guys.

@assafg2: I suppose you mean "shared hosting". Yes, can't see why that would matter. You can point the tool at any publicly accessible web server.

@Pieter: no, you can't, but how is that a problem?

@grettir:
1. to be clear, *the tool* won't install on IIS6, but you can point it to a server running on IIS6. Or Apache. Or ObscureWebServerThatNobodyKnowsAbout 2.0.
2. For each violation, there is a "recommended action" so I'm not sure I'm following what you're saying.